I like making my own, but for the times you need something non-experimental, Stubbs Chicken Marinade is fantastic.

A great side dish is made by slicing potatoes fairly thin, and tossing them between two sheets of aluminum foil. You'll also want to coat the potatoes with a decent olive oil, and add salt, pepper, thyme, bay, and rosemary. Chuck those on your grill, flip once.

Dane wrote:A great side dish is made by slicing potatoes fairly thin, and tossing them between two sheets of aluminum foil. You'll also want to coat the potatoes with a decent olive oil, and add salt, pepper, thyme, bay, and rosemary. Chuck those on your grill, flip once.

Grehn|Skipjack wrote:Had delicious fried chicken and mashed potatoes last night. Wish I knew more ways to cook beef than "Stick it in a pan and wait for all the red to go away".

Depends on what type of beef you are cooking with, but a simple thing to do with beef strips is to throw some red onions (cut roughly the same size as your strips) in at the same time as your beef, followed closely by soy sauce and red wine vinegar. After sauteing those for a bit, your beef should be cooked and your onions should be caramelizing (browned around the edges). At this point you can add fresh vegetables that don't need to cook for long, but rather just brought up to the temperature of the rest of the dish. I typically add cilantro, green onions, and a few tomato wedges. Serve with some white rice, and you're done. Alternative methods to this dish include adding garlic to the beef when it's sautéing and/or adding french fries to the beef right after your fresh vegetables. Optional spices include salt, pepper, and cumin. This dish is known as a saltado.

As for my own cooking, I'm a dessert nut, so I've been baking a lot lately. I made an awesome lemon rum cornmeal pound cake a couple days ago, and I think my next project will be a soufflé of some sort.

Fridmarr wrote:Alton Brown made some chili once where he used crushed tortilla chips instead of beans. I've always been curious to make it and see what it was like. Lore, get on it.

Interestingly enough...I'm not a chili nut, but once read a thread (on another gaming forum) where a few chili die-hards were claiming that "real" chili didn't use any beans at all.

Anyone else familiar with this theory?

Ya, the original chilli is called chile, I think it was based of Chile con Carne, a mexican dish. The dish is made with homemade chile salsa and beef or pork. That must have been a while ago though, Texans have had mexican food influence for many years, so it was probably morphed a long long time ago.

Fridmarr wrote:Alton Brown made some chili once where he used crushed tortilla chips instead of beans. I've always been curious to make it and see what it was like. Lore, get on it.

Alton Brown is my hero so I will have to try this. Though I'll probably still have the beans in there. Was that on Good Eats? I'll have to find the episode.

I've thought about going to culinary school quite a bit, but for the moment I'm pretty focused on the gaming industry.

Vanifae wrote:What do you put in your chili?

I have to take the lazy man's route and use mostly canned ingredients since I don't have the time to prep them all properly myself (at least without ending up with the "chili" some people make that ends up more like a salsa). But I use:

Brown up the hamburger in a saucepan first, with about 1 tbsp of water (just enough to cover the bottom of the pan) to help keep it from forming large chunks. Toss some chili powder in there to add some flavor to the meat. Once it's brown, drain the grease and dump the meat into a larger pot. Dump all the canned goods and the jalapenos in there, and add some seasoning -- chili powder is a must, and I like to add in a few other random herbs like basil and a little paprika. I've got one of those "italian herbs & seasoning" grinder things too; I don't know what all is in there but it's good.

Cook that on a medium high heat until it's nice and hot. Best way to tell if it's ready or not is to sample a bean to see if they're cooked all the way. If it's not crunchy or gritty, you're good to go. Toss it in a bowl, top with some shredded mozzarella, and voila!

I spend a good amount of time trying to expand my repertoire in the kitchen and am actually pretty accomplished at this point. The frustrating thing is when the wife won't let you get take-out because it doesn't compare... this has happened with pizza (Italian-style pizza -with dough from scratch- being something I used to make quite a bit).

Some of my specialties include enchiladas (I make the chile sauce from scratch here... often using dried chilies because they keep well, but I'd like to give fresh a go sometime - it's hard getting the right blend I want fresh), spaghetti meat sauce, anything that's based on a bechamel (cheese sauces included... I make an awesome from-scratch macaroni and cheese), and breads (quick-breads are relatively easy to master, it's the leavened type that I've spent most of my time improving).

Breakfast is something I've always done very well, but my very young daughter is allergic to both wheat and eggs (I'm really hoping she outgrows them both) so that's shut down my breakfast factory for the most part. I have managed to make some decent oat pancakes without eggs (my stand-by pancake recipe actually has no flour to begin with, so it was only the egg modification I needed). But I miss egg sandwiches and waffles and crepes and french toast (oh how I miss french toast give me back my CUSTARDS!!). I've only recently been permitted to bring eggs back into the kitchen to make some brownies (they weren't as spectacular as normal, I used too much flour) and I hope to make some cookies soon (dark chocolate mint cookies with white chocolate chips are my plan will have to find a way of hiding them so the little one doesn't discover what I've been doing behind her back).

So, avoiding wheat and eggs has been the theme of late. I've been making skillet-hamburgers, spaghetti sauce, and various roasts lately. Meat and veggies are the theme.